Leadership Development

Optimise your leadership development to drive engagement in the workforce

Our leadership development programs

SACS leadership development programs include modules in a wide range of areas.

Examples include:

• Positive psychology activities associated with optimism, positivity, future focus and resilience.
• Alignment related activities:
  • Effective performance management
  • Self-generated behaviour protocols
  • Management of underperformance
  • Management of counterproductive work behaviours
  • Effective goal setting
  • Effective performance conversations

• Team cohesion and effectiveness activities:
  • Change without pain
  • Group based destination setting
  • Group action planning
  • Development of shared competencies
  • Management of diversity
  • Stakeholder management
  • Effective project management

• Learning and growth activities:
  • Team based coaching programs
  • The neuroscience of learning
  • Effective coaching
  • Organisational and team improvement activities

The science behind leadership development

Below is the SACS model of cultural vitality, showing the five categories of behaviour that have the greatest impact on staff and their capacity to contribute to your organisation.

• Positivity, optimism and future focus. This component of leadership development was ignored for many years. However recent research in the world of positive psychology demonstrates that it is one of the most important components of effective leadership. SACS aims to teach leaders the behaviours that cause their staff to feel that their leaders are positive, optimistic and future focused.

• Esteem. There is substantial research to demonstrate that staff need to feel valued and esteemed by their employer. When staff feel like this, they have the confidence to demonstrate creativity and initiative, and in addition to this they are much more likely to commit to the organisation and feel engaged with it.

• Alignment. Good leaders create a sense of alignment amongst their employees. This is reflected in behaviours such as explaining the mission of the organisation, the team and the individual role clearly in terms of outcomes, so that employees can understand clearly what success looks like. Effective leaders also create clarity about acceptable and unacceptable behaviours. Some leaders feel that they should ‘go easy’ on inappropriate behaviours or underperformance out of a sense of kindness or generosity, however, fellow employees of people who are under-performing or behaving inappropriately tend to be very disappointed at this generosity and lenience because it reduces their pride in their workplace. SACS teaches the behaviours of appropriate management of underperformance and counterproductive behaviours.

• Belonging. Effective leaders cause staff to work together effectively and to harmonise in a productivity sense, and to work on a group basis rather than a purely individualistic basis. Research evidence suggests that leaders that cause groups to harmonise and to work together to solve problems, bring about sustained and powerful increases in morale amongst those employees.

• Growth. Good leaders encourage their staff to learn by involving them in solving problems in the workplace. This kind of development is far more powerful than training programs that cause people to learn in a theoretical way. Practical activities that improve the workplace are the best learning opportunities that staff can have, and they also contribute to an active and immediate sense of optimism, which is very powerful for staff.

The importance of leadership development plans and coaching is well known; similarly evidenced based, best practice processes.